At the beginning of this week, Wokingham Borough Council published a large number of addendum documents that they had received from the Crest Nicholson led consortium relating to their current application for the two thousand houses in the northern part of the Arborfield Strategic Development Location. Residents who commented on the initial application should have received a notification from the council advising them of the revised documents, and giving them notification of the consultation period on the changes – very short compared to the original consultation period in that comments have to be received by 12th February. The schedule is necessarily tight as any delay in this application will have a domino effect, in particular on the release of the land from the MoD to Crest Nicholson and onto Wokingham Borough Council for the Secondary School application that is running concurrently. Whilst it is expected that the well produced detailed application for the school will pass on time, the process for releasing the MoD land to Crest Nicholson will not take place until the planning application on the land is approved, as clearly land without planning is worthless to a developer such as Crest Nicholson. That will clearly affect the ability of Wokingham Borough Council to deliver the school, however it should be noted that Cllr Keith Baker stated at the recent school meeting that there is a contingency plan in place should the main application need further revision before approval.
The new documents cover the broad swathe of the application with changes and additions in details of the overall design, how heritage assets are treated, landscape and trees, open space and leisure, ecology and the SPA mitigation, retail, housing and probably most importantly to most people transport and highways. Thanks to Matt we have been given a digital copy of the documents which can be found in both an unpacked form and zipped into a single archive on this share along with a zipped copy of the original application documents for comparison.
There is a lot to take in, however some key headlines over areas we know were of concern:
- The ongoing Area B debate has again resulted in some changes, and depending on which plan you look at area BB1 next to the tennis courts has now been changed to be an area of allotments. The other area of new housing in the area that currently includes the parking for the Garrison Church is still retained, however the plans do now include replacement parking to mitigate the loss of the parking area adjacent to the cricket pavilion, a new parking area off Whitehall Drive, and on street parking along the length of Whitehall Drive. Whilst the plan still diverges from the development limits set by Wokingham Borough Council, it now corresponds largely with the development areas proposed by JTP in 2013. There is a significant section of additional justification as to why the plans diverge from the Wokingham Borough Council developable areas in the design and access statement.
- The internal road network has been tweaked slightly to take the main route through the development down Princess Marina Drive to the edge of the district centre rather than past the existing houses on Sheerlands Road. However it should be noted that the developers are still proposing that Sheerlands Road will be one of the main routes for construction traffic. The plans also consistently omit the access roads to any of the houses on Sheerlands Road, or around onto Tyler Drive – when we’ve raised that in the past the response has always been that it is a mistake and there are no proposed changes to these accesses, however this is not confirmed anywhere in the application.
- People wanting a better idea of how the final development will look will want to look at the extensive Design Access Statement Addendum which defines the feature areas of the development with lots of pretty pictures and sketches. It’s still not exactly consistent for example in one place it suggests that the housing being put outside the developable boundaries on the open space at the corner of Baird Road and Sheerlands Road should be “sensitively nestled within the parkland fabric”, whilst two pages on suggests the housing should have a “strong frontage” defining the new edge of the parkland with the encroachment of the housing.
- Some of the more controversial proposals for the roads, for example around the junction of Biggs Lane and Langley Common Road, and the Barkham Ride/Commonfield Lane junction have been changed. There is a significant discussion of why Commonfield Lane is going to remain much as it is. Instead there is a proposal to widen Barkham Bridge. Whilst the Langley Common Road proposals are better they’re still proposing to fill in the underpass without providing an alternative method for pedestrians from Arborfield Cross to cross.
- For residents in White Horse Lane there is finally acknowledgement that the SDL will increase traffic flows along the lane, however along with California Crossroads the response is essentially to give the local community a lump of money and ask us to solve it through a working party that is being set up by the council. Considering that the developer is supposed to be able to show that their development is nil detriment, essentially handing one of the most complex problems to solve to local people seems to be primarily an effort to absolve themselves of any responsibility for actually fixing the significant effect their development will have at the crossroads.
- The revised transport documents also include responses to the comments from Arborfield, Barkham, Swallowfield, Finchampstead and Eversley parish councils, plus a significant set of comments from Hampshire County Council. We suspect those councils are going to be less than pleased with the responses as in most cases the response is to justify the original proposals. As before the developers have no coherent public transport proposals aside from their ongoing negotiations with Reading Buses over the number 3, and seem to be hoping lots of the new residents are going to hop on a bike rather than doing what everybody with an ounce of common sense knows they will do and get in the car.
Even if you did not respond to the original application, you are able to submit a response to these revised documents. If you did submit a response originally, you can respond again to the updated documents, both commenting on whether or not these revised proposals addressed your initial concerns, and also making additional points on the new material. As before the planning application number for comments is O/2014/2280.
